Nicolás Paris presents a new intervention project at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in México City. The exhibition was inaugurated this year and it will remain open to the public until January 6 of 2013. The pioneering project aims at developing a new work dynamic at the MUAC that will establish a direct interaction between the curatorial program of exhibitions and the department of public programs. Thus, it aims at generating a space for reflection, a field of study and action centered on the existing and possible relationships between the museum and the community based on shared experiences and knowledge.
The objective of the project is to carry out work and pedagogic research processes that will result in an exhibition and in a series of activities developed in several phases to create new forms of collaboration and exchange between viewers, artists, and the museum staff.
With this idea in mind, a specific architecture has been designed in the 7 and 8 exhibition halls where the project by Paris will be presented. There, the artist proposes four central themes that target different publics. The School of Mediation, directed to the public programs team at the MUAC and at other similar institutions, represents an attempt to generate ideas, referents, metaphors, and points of departure for future projects based on dialogue. As its name indicates, the School for Professors is a support space for school teachers. The Laboratories target young students from several fields and disciplines, teachers, artists, architects, urban experts, etc. It represents a space to share the ways in which they operate and work with, and within, the museum. Lastly, the Para-Exhibitions are micro temporary exhibitions that explore the themes in question and the likely pedagogical and research dynamics in the field.
The goal of this artist is to measure the limits and reach of the curatorial practices and processes in the education department of the museum. This with the goal of developing new functions, relationships, and responsibilities with the community. Rather than to offer a final product, the project was conceived for the creation of a structure-network of collective thought that would include expandable and multidirectional parts that would serve in the exploration and creation of new strategies and possibilities—and also in the assessment of old processes that could be integrated to the whole.
In Nicolás Paris' own words, "The challenge is to build an extraordinary place that like a mirror of society offers, on the one hand, the teaching staff at the museum the opportunity to find strategies that communicate the catalytic potential of art, and on the other, the chance for visitors to make connections by using art as a tool."